Sustainable Blockchain-Based Digital Twin Management Architecture for IoT Devices

Abstract

As the number of IoT devices increases, sustainability is becoming a bottleneck of the production process in industrial systems. As a matter of fact, inefficient management and scarce resources significantly impeded the development of sustainability. In recent years, it has been observed that the digital twin technology plays a promising role in facilitating the interaction between the Internet of Things (IoT) assets and digital services. However, high-fidelity models of digital twins raise the requirement of efficient data flows, which is limited by realistic constraints such as data collection strategy and energy supply. We propose a sustainable data collection and management approach to construct digital twins for physical assets. With this approach, data packets are uploaded to the data brokers, namely agents, by a large number of IoT devices. The challenge lies in the balance between enduring data collection and the information loss associated with the stale data. In this article, we aim to optimize the metrics of data fidelity and reveal delay while guaranteeing both sustainable energy and sustainable information. Additionally, a shareable and sustainable blockchain-based digital twin management architecture is proposed, which does not rely on data exchanges with a single centralized server. Our analytical and simulation results demonstrate the applicability of our proposed architecture.